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What Respect Have Wahhabis
Shown to Muslim Monuments?

By

Melik Kaylan

Updated Aug. 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

Two weekends ago, a certain identifiable swatch of world community worthies -- United Nations and European Union dignitaries, Muslim princes and ambassadors, NGO officials -- came together in Bosnia to celebrate the reopening of the famous Mostar Bridge. It had been destroyed by Bosnian Croats in 1993, during the Bosnian War, to expunge a symbol of cosmopolitan Islam dating from 16th-century Ottoman times. Its destruction caused an uproar, and rightly so. Simultaneously, Bosnian Serbs were busy obliterating some 70% of the local Muslims' historic monuments. The Serbs then moved on to similar deeds in Kosovo.